450 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
which Adorno had judged to be conformist through and through, the
SPD were only able to improve their position slightly by taking votes
from the Free Democrats. Perhaps this explains why the Social Demo-
crats thought their best chances lay in the Grand Coalition with the
CDU.
Horkheimer and Adorno had always been extremely wary ofnational-
conservative tendencies in Germany. They believed that the govern-
ment was not energetic enough in combating the right-wing parties and
the resurgence of anti-Semitism. And until the Auschwitz trials in Frank-
furt (1963–5) there had also been a lack of urgency in prosecuting those
guilty of the mass crimes of the Nazi period. Lawyers such as Richard
Schmid, Fritz Bauer and Martin Hirsch, all of whom urged that the
criminals should be investigated and punished, including the desk
murderers, were few and far between.
Politically the year in which Negative Dialectics appeared was un-
doubtedly something of a watershed. The collapse of the cabinet under
Ludwig Erhard, with his authoritarian programme of a ‘fully-formed
society’,^9 had led at the end of 1966 to the establishment of the Grand
Coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. Their declared
goal was to introduce change into ossified policies both at home and
abroad, but they were perceived at the start as the promoters of the
long-planned emergency laws. Many people, Adorno included, saw these
laws as a threat to democracy, particularly since, as the alliance of the
two largest parties, the Grand Coalition implied the loss of a strong
parliamentary opposition. This democratic deficit, of which Adorno
was very conscious, was ultimately one of the chief causes for the estab-
lishment of the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO), which turned
out to be a crucial critical force against the emergency laws. In addition
to these domestic targets, further factors included the American war in
Vietnam, to which the West German government gave its support; the
monopolistic trends in the media, and especially the Springer Press; the
visit in 1967 of the dictatorial shah of Persia; and, lastly, the educational
crisis in German universities. In November 1967 a ceremony in honour
of the university rector was disrupted by the action of the increasingly
politicized students. Two student representatives brought what became
a celebrated banner into the largest lecture hall in the presence of the
body of academic staff. It bore the motto: ‘Beneath their robes: the
mustiness of two thousand years’.
The student groups who came out in favour of reforms in the univer-
sities were identical with those who formed the core of the growing
anti-Vietnam protesters as well as with those who sympathized with
liberation movements in the Third World. They received backing from
younger members of the institute such as Oskar Negt, but also from
Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas, both of whom spoke in the
first large German anti-Vietnam protest gatherings in Frankfurt am Main
and Berlin, the most notable of which was the student congress entitled